Business managers have been heard to exclaim, “Who authorized THAT”, upon seeing a larger-than-expected cost item. Such an exclamation is heard frequently, and in the age of ever larger and larger ecosystems and more and more complex business dealings, legacy techniques to answer the question, “Who authorized THAT” becomes onerous. Legacy solutions merely allow the user to manually drill down from the current document to the immediate predecessor document. For example, if the business manager made the exclamation at the sight of a purchase order, then retrieval of the details of the corresponding purchase requisition and its authorization signatures might answer the business manager's question. If, however the business manager made the exclamation at the sight of a line item in an accounts payable listing, then there might be many more retrievals needed to be accomplished before getting the answer to, “Who authorized THAT”. Legacy techniques merely allow a user to manually drill down from the current document to the immediate predecessor document (e.g., from a line item in an accounts payable listing to a corresponding line item in a purchase order). If there are multiple document levels then the aforementioned legacy techniques force the user to manually keep on drilling down. In some legacy situations a report indicates a flow (e.g., through a life cycle) from cost inception to cost payment, yet this technique fails to reduce the number of keystrokes. If the user has a long list of cost items to research, the task can balloon into an onerous task involving a huge number of keystrokes, thus resulting in loss of productivity.
What's needed are techniques to easily integrate the various software applications making-up an accounting system with a configurable cost item life cycle viewer that can accept and act on configurable document traversal options.